Part (1) The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Toltec Wisdom
These Toltec people came from southern Mexico. They have ancestral wisdom of spiritual knowledge. This esoteric knowledge was concealed for a long time; however, it was passed through generations by different lineages of Toltec masters and followers. The knowledge stems from the same unity of truth for all sacred esoteric traditions. It’s not a religion, but a way of life.
The Smoky Mirror
The author says that everything that exists – you and me is made up of light. Light is a living messenger and has all information. Human perception is merely light perceiving another light. Every matter, object that we see, feel is just a reflector of light, that create images and this world of illusion – “The Dream Planet”. It is like the smoke that doesn’t allow us to see the truth. The surrounding world is nothing but millions of manifestations of illusionary objects. Everyone is a mirror; they are just the same as you. It’s just no one understand because you are “The smoky mirror” to everyone. This smoke that surrounds everyone is created by the illusions, interpretations of the images of light, so everyone is living a dream without awareness. The smoke is the dream and the mirror is you – the dreamer.
“Everything around you is a misunderstanding, so living is easy with closed eyes”.
Then, the author talks about how we are Domesticated in this “The Dream Planet”
We – the humans are dreaming all the time – be it awake or sleep. When we are awake, we see this material frame and perceive it but all of it is just an illusion – a dream story build by us “The dreamers”. The dream changes constantly – A new dream, a new story each day.
Before we were born, a big outside dream was created by millions of dreamers making personal dreams, dream family, dream society, dream community, dream country, dream of the humanity, dream behavior, rules, beliefs, laws, religion, cultures, governments in society, dream goals, and finally the entire dream planet. We are born with the capacity to dream and the humans (dreamers) who live before us teach us to dream their dream society’s way. Parents, school, religion teaches us their self-created perfect way of dreaming and actually they have also learnt from their ancestors.
We can dream billions of things; however, we use our attention to focus on one perception at a time and by repetition (done by parents, teachers and religion), it hooks on to our brain and becomes our dreams and beliefs. All the knowledge learned till now, a big dream reality of how to behave in this world. During childhood, everyone tried to hook your attention and now you desire hooking onto others attention. The outside world communicates with you through language – the words. Every letter, word in any language spoken is an agreement and as the world communicated with us, they created agreements and soon we started creating agreements with ourselves based on the same belief system. As children, we could not choose our beliefs, so whatever we were taught, we agreed and it became our agreement to which our lives run – The sand castle. We feel protected, virtuous, as we work in accordance with the agreement made with the society and guilty, wrong as we did something against it. Basically, we become domesticated by the society just like a pet – with rewards and punishments as we do tasks in accordance or against the society. The reward feels good and thus we started doing what others want – the dream rules of the dream society. We became our parents’ beliefs, religion, and society’s beliefs. As we grow adults, we run on auto-domestication and start domesticating others. This belief system is like “The book of Law '' and we become the inner judge – a follower of that book of law. The other part of us bears all the guilt, becomes a victim, when we go against this book of law. We pay a million times for one mistake in our brain and suffer injustice. Society, parents, and spouses make us pay even more for that one mistake. 95% of the time, these beliefs are lies and we suffer all because of lies.
In this dream of a planet, it is normal to fear, suffer, create emotional dramas, anger, revenge, addiction, violence. Everything stems for “The fear”. The fear of being punished, neglected, guilt, and pain. Religion says that “Hell is a place of fear, suffering, and pain.”. Aren’t we already living in hell? Aren’t we all burning day and night from suffering? Hell is a state of mind and hell is all around us. All humanity is searching for truth, justice and beauty and our search is endless as we see the truth with our agreements – The book of law, everything is smoky and we are blind, thus, no truth can be seen.
“We live in a fog such that we can’t see any further than our nose and further, this fog is a dream”.
Human mind is a dream where thousands of people chatter at the same time and no one understands each other. The mind is entrapped by illusion – the Maya and can’t perceive the truth. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of the human mind – the fear of self judgment and judgment by others – the whole cycle of reward and punishment. This makes us unauthentic – wearing a social mask every time. If someone abuses you more than you abuse yourself – you walk away and if it is less than your self-abuse, you tolerate. The more self-love we have, the less we experience self -abuse. Self-abuse stems from self-rejection and that comes from our dream image of a perfect ideal being.
The New Dream
We have made thousands of agreements with ourselves and others till now. These false agreements make us suffer and fail. To live a life of joy and fulfillment, all fear-based agreements need to be broken and form new love-based agreements. Fear-based agreements drain our energy whereas love-based one’s conserve energy and even gain extra energy. Breaking old fear-based agreements will return the energy you used to create it. Adopting the new four agreements will provide you the personal power to change the entire system of old agreements. You can create and live in your own personal dream of heaven even when hell surrounds you.
- Dr. Nikita Mundhara
Listen Our Podcast on Your Favorite Platform:
Spotify | Google Podcast | Gaana | Saavn | Anchor
Follow Us on Social Media Platforms: